DIRECT DEMOCRACY
Critics of representative democracy argue that government serves the public's interest only when the two become one. In this view, it is too difficult to make representatives accountable for their actions even with periodic elections, and, in any case, the public is capable of governing itself directly. If a democratic system makes all decisions in this way, vote and voice become unnecessary, because the public has no bad rep resentatives to reject or chastise. Instead, citizens deliberate together, then express their views directly through their own votes. If their votes produce policies that undermine the public's interest, they have no one to blame but themselves. Even when writing in theoretical terms, however, advocates of direct democracy do not go that far.
The most influential writer on direct democracy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for direct self-governance in The Social Contract over two hundred years ago. Rousseau maintained that government and its laws can only embody the general will if they come directly from the governed. Rousseau envisioned face-to-face assemblies of citizens as the ideal form of democratic deliberation and policymaking, but he reluctantly recognized the limits of this vision. "It is impossible to imagine," he wrote, "that the people should remain in perpetual assembly to attend to public affairs." Thus, even Rousseau recognized that a direct system of democracy would have some measure of representation, although the public might be divided into small electorates that maintained an intimate relationship with their representatives.[1]
One of the most recent proposals for a such a system came from Frank Bryan, a University of Vermont political science professor, and John McClaughry, a Vermont state senator. In The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (1989) these authors outline a system that places the greatest amount of political power in the hands of local shires made up of 10,000 people in five to ten towns. In this vision of democracy, citizens would make most of the important decisions of their lives within these shires. True direct democracy would take place in small town meetings, and these face-to-face assemblies would also elect the most powerful local representatives. State government would have relatively little power, and its primary role would be channeling funds to the shires and providing them with technical assistance on matters of policy. Relatively few decisions would be made at state and federal levels, and shires would even have ways of playing a direct role in the nation's foreign policy.
Kevin O'Leary suggests another means by which large-scale institutions can be brought down to the community level. He proposes that every congressional district in the United States should have a legislative assembly, representing flfty subdistricts. The 435 such assemblies across the country "would have the duties of helping to set the legislative agenda and … deliberating and voting on bills that have passed the House." In effect, a bill that made it through Congress would then have one more stop before reaching the president. If deemed sufficiently important by the joint executive committee overseeing the network of assemblies, each local body would deliberate and vote on a bill, and their votes would be decisive.[2]
Local legislative assemblies would not be a form of direct democracy per se. They would make federal government more local, however, and because of the small size of the local assemblies, the process appears closer to the ideal of direct democracy than the present system. Because they would constitute yet another layer of representation, the assemblies would nevertheless suffer some from of the problems detailed in chapter 3. In effect, the proposal creates another layer of government but does not fundamentally change the process by which average voters select and influence representatives. No doubt the assemblies would give even greater influence to their most active constituents, but that would further increase the influence of the most influential.
John Burnheim has proposed a different system of direct government. Like the Vermont shire system, Burnheim's "demarchy" shifts considerable power away from federal and state governments to local authorities. Demarchy decentralizes power not only vertically but also horizontally: whereas the shire system would have powerful local governments to manage the business of each town and shire, demarchy splits up those local powers for each major public function. The local transportation bureau and the hospital board, for example, would govern themselves separately. Moreover, the public officials who managed these agencies would not be elected; instead, a random lottery would periodically select representatives from among the citizens who used each public good.[3]
The idea of direct legislation has become popular in many countries, however, and it is, in some ways, practiced in the United States. Many states permit citizen-sponsored referenda and initiatives. Through an initiative, voters can propose a legislative measure or a constitutional amendment by obtaining the required number of signatures on a petition. A referendum gives voters the chance to approve or reject a policy
Unfortunately, referenda and initiative elections suffer from the same maladies that plague elections for public office. For instance, surveys have found that "as many as one-third to a majority of those voting" report feeling "uncomfortable about voting because they needed more information or more time to discuss the issue or to read the voter pamphlet more carefully, or found that the statement was too hard to read and comprehend."[6] When an initiative on the ballot receives little notice, voters may have nothing to base their vote upon other than the confusing wording of the initiative itself. In relatively high-visibility referendum elections, such as the recent votes on affirmative action and the civil rights of homosexuals in Western states, average voters are likely to have much more information, although much of it may be misleading, deceptive, or simply inaccurate.[7] For these elections to work properly, they would have to be far more deliberative in character, and chapter 7 suggests a way in which states might improve the initiative and referenda processes.
Even when initiative elections work properly, however, they do not provide a substitute for representative government. They can complement indirect democracy with periodic opportunities for direct citizen involvement in policy decision making, but few consider the initiative process a practical method for conducting all of the public's legislative business. This reality brings back into focus the difficulty of ensuring effective electoral relief from bad representation, and the remainder of this chapter examines different proposals for meeting that challenge.